Courtesy of Pam Martens
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens
Yesterday, President Donald Trump accused Google in a Tweet of rigging its search results to suppress the “voices of Conservatives.” That’s the same complaint that the secretive Charles Koch network of super wealthy political operatives have been attempting to address with media front groups for more than a decade. Trump now appears to be using his bully pulpit in an effort to legitimize those Koch-funded media outlets.
The billionaire fossil fuels magnate, Charles Koch, has a lot of balls in the air right now and some are at risk of falling to earth with a thud. He’s currently in a battle to beat out the National Republican Committee (RNC) as the go-to guy for voter database, data mining and targeted social media ads in the midterms and all future elections. (See our report: Koch Industries Is Staffing Up with Voter Data Scientists to Tip the November Election to the Extreme Right.) That effort had some air knocked out of it earlier this month when Politico reported that RNC Chair, Ronna McDaniel, sent out a memo warning Republicans to steer clear of the Koch operation out of fear that it might “weaponize that data against Republicans if their business interests conflicted with electing Republicans….”
Charles Koch also has a problem with mainstream media’s repulsion of the Donald Trump administration, in which the Koch network has installed more than four dozen people who formerly worked for it. Charles Koch is the CEO of Koch Industries and it’s in the midst of an expensive media re-branding campaign to make itself appear wholesome instead of a Machiavellian mastermind of creating four decades of front groups working to deny climate change, gut Federal regulations and create a kleptocracy in the U.S. Unfortunately, Trump’s immigration policy, which produced TV images of infants in detention cages and Trump’s labeling prominent black women as “low IQ” or “a dog” on his Twitter page meant that Charles Koch had to attempt to distance himself from Trump while still keeping his troops in pivotal spots in the Trump administration.
We reported on the Koch network’s “media” front groups all the way back in 2010, writing as follows:
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